Oscar Handlin and the Problem of Ethnic Pluralism and African American Civil Rights

Abstract

AS THE NATION grappled with African American civil rights in the 1950s and 1960s, historian Oscar Handlin, like many scholars of his generation, set out to make sense of the role of race in American democracy and to determine the proper path of black liberation. Handlin, already a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian of immigration, viewed both civil rights and the experiences of American blacks through a lens of ethnic pluralism. Like many historians and social scientists following the Second World War, Handlin rejected race as an analytical category, asserting in Race and Nationality in American Life (1957) “that there is no evidence of any inborn differences of temperament, personality, character, or intelligence among the races.” Instead, he argued that ethnicity was “the only meaningful basis on which one can compare social and cultural traits.” The notion that American society was composed of disparate ethnic groups with their own particular cultural affinities resonated with liberal social scientists and historians of the 1950s and 1960s for a number of reasons. Ethnic pluralism was, of course, consistent with models of interest group politics that had gained primacy following the New Deal. More to the point, in identifying culture as the nexus of group identity, ethnic pluralism constituted a formal rejection of eugenics and other biological metaphors of race. Handlin’s identification of African Americans as an ethnic rather than racial group would ultimately lead him to draw fairly optimistic conclusions about the future of American race relations. In 1959, for example, Handlin’s The Newcomers assessed the character and consequences of Puerto Rican and black migration to New York City. The study, which was commissioned by the nonprofit Regional Plan Association, Inc., of the greater New York metropolitan area, rejected the charge that these groups were uniquely prone to social ills such as crime, vice, and family dissolution. Instead, Handlin argued that many of the problems associated with African Americans and Puerto Ricans generally paralleled those of previous immigrant